The excitng part lays in the challenge that there is still room for improvement from the business, subject to our capital equipment and raw material/consuamble partners contiuning to work with us.
Anthony, you are very brave to come into this den of disbelief. Normally logic and rational thought don't always work too well in such a environment but sometimes it does. So sometimes it is worth the risk.
Yes, I agree that there is still a lot of room for improvements. Irrespective to what the many experienced printing individuals on this forum might say, there is still a lot of faults in the process that need to be corrected. Sometimes the best option is to ignore their views and just go with what you believe might be a path forward.
Anyhow, back to the potential of the process and therefore the business.
Colour consistency and predictability with fast response of the press is at the heart of the printing part of the operation. There is room there for improvement. Even on modern offset presses, there are no mechanical components that are directly related to the amount of ink that is fed into the press roller train. The position of the ink key is not directly related to the amount of ink that goes into the press.
Surely a consistent ink feed should result in a consistent and predictable print density. Unfortunately this is not an accepted idea in the industry but maybe you can understand it. Your Inpress technology probably does a good job of maintaining density control but what it is mainly doing is maintaining ink feed which was not designed properly by the press manufacturer in the first place.
Ink key presetting. This is also critical to the initial set up. Unfortunately most ink key presetting algorithms do not properly calculate the ink requirements for each ink key. Proof of this can be seen from looking at the presetting values you might be using and comparing them to the values the Inpress system finally obtains. If they tend to be different, then one must assume that the initial ink key presetting values were not calculate properly.
You have a press most likely with a ductor roller that moves and takes ink from the ink fountain roller to the roller train. With such a technology it is almost impossible to obtain an accurate zero setting for the ink keys. I define the zero setting as the point where the net ink feed into the press is just at zero. Any increase in the ink key position and ink will go into the press. This is important because the zero set point is the datum for any ink key presetting values. It is a major factor affecting accuracy.
So you have the Inpress system which is fine and it overcomes the limitations of not having a positive ink feed, or an accurate presetting algorithm or an accurate zero set Datum point.
But by not starting at the right values, the press will start to go in the wrong direction with respect to colour for a short time before the Inpress system can recover from that condition. That takes time and paper. That is where there is an opportunity.
Closed loop systems are fine but they only respond to disturbances that move colour off its target while in principle a forced ink feed is consistent and independent of those disturbances.
There are so many issues with the press that can be improved and I am pretty sure there are also issues with prepress that can be made more predictable. Unfortunately, the industry is not so interested in finding new ways and is more interested in protecting old knowledge and thinking with expensive technology.
